I’m reading an amazing book right now, Untamed, by Glennon Doyle.
Wow.
I read her previous two books so I knew this would be amazing because her writing is honest and raw.
A theme from all of her books is about learning how to stop avoiding pain, learning how to feel pain and all of our feelings, so we can be the fullest versions of ourselves.
Sound familiar? See The Ring of Fire, Discomfort, How to Embrace Discomfort.
I want to share a few excerpts from her newest book to help you shift some thinking. Buy this book and read it (I don’t get commission, just wanted to recommend it)!
” You’re not doing life wrong; you’re doing it right. If there’s any secret you’re missing, it’s that doing it right is just really hard. Feeling all your feelings is hard, but that’s what they’re for. Feelings are for feeling. All of them. Even the hard ones. The secret is that you’re doing it right, and that doing it right hurts sometimes.
I did not know, before that woman told me, that all feelings were for feeling. I did not know that I was supposed to feel everything. I thought I was supposed to feel happy. I thought that happy was for feeling and that pain was for fixing and numbing and deflecting and hiding and ignoring. I thought that when life got hard, it was because I had gone wrong somewhere. I thought that pain was weakness and that I was supposed to suck it up. But the thing was that the more I sucked it up, the more food and booze I had to suck down.
From that day forward, I began to practice feeling it all. I began to insist upon my right and responsibility to feel it all, even when taking the time and energy for feeling made me a little less efficient, a little less convenient, a little less pleasant.
What I thought would kill me, didn’t. Every time I said to myself: I can’t take this anymore—I was wrong. The truth was that I could and did take it all—and I kept surviving. Surviving again and again made me less afraid of myself, of other people, of life. I learned that I’d never be free from pain but I could be free from the fear of pain, (bold added by Ellen) and that was enough. I finally stopped avoiding fires long enough to let myself burn, and what I learned was that I am like that burning bush: The fire of pain won’t consume me. I can burn and burn and live. I can live on fire. I am fireproof.
I am here to keep becoming truer, more beautiful versions of myself again and again forever. To be alive is to be in a perpetual state of revolution. Whether I like it or not, pain is the fuel of revolution. Everything I need to become the woman I’m meant to be next is inside my feelings of now. Life is alchemy, and emotions are the fire that turns me to gold. I will continue to become only if I resist extinguishing myself a million times a day. If I can sit in the fire of my own feelings, I will keep becoming.
Pain is not tragic. Pain is magic. Suffering is tragic. Suffering is what happens when we avoid pain and consequently miss our becoming. That is what I can and must avoid: missing my own evolution because I am too afraid to surrender to the process. Having such little faith in myself that I numb or hide or consume my way out of my fiery feelings again and again. So my goal is to stop abandoning myself—and stay. To trust that I’m strong enough to handle the pain that is necessary to the process of becoming. Because what scares me a hell of a lot more than pain is living my entire life and missing my becoming. What scares me more than feeling it all is missing it all.”
Here’s another excerpt if you’d like to read more.
The reason I’m sharing her words with you today is that I want to encourage you to be brave. The only reason we don’t move forward with anything in our lives that we truly desire is fear. And what we fear is how it will make us feel.
- We’re afraid to risk loving because we fear feeling hurt, rejected or heartbroken.
- We’re afraid to move forward on a project or business because we’re afraid we’ll feel like a failure or that we’ll feel uncertain if we don’t know “how’.
- We’re afraid to lose money because of the fear of feeling financially insecure or inadequate.
But what if we stopped being afraid of pain or negative feelings?
What if we could believe that we are strong?
What if we could believe that we can do hard things?
What would be different about your life if you could do that?
Who/what would you become?
